In large-scale medical institutions, there have been developed large-scale diagnosis aiding systems that aid a series of tasks on a workflow from reception of patients to completion of examination and diagnosis (for example, refer to Patent Document 1: Japanese Patent Publication TOKKAI No. 2003-224703). On a workflow, for example, tasks of (1) registration of reception of patients, (2) examination photographing, (3) inspection of images (confirming the image quality of photographed images) (4) diagnosis (interpretation of photographed images), and (5) accounting, are carried out in different places in this order. In accordance with such a workflow, a diagnosis system distributes processing functions corresponding to respective tasks to a plurality of terminals, and connects the respective terminals via a network to make them collaborate with each other. The tasks include, for example, (1) registration processing of patient information, (2) digitizing photographed images taken by examination photographing (a console function), (3) image processing of photographed images, (4) display processing of photographed images for interpretation of the images (a viewer function), and (5) accounting processing.
With a large-scale diagnosis aiding system, as described above, plural people, such as a doctor, engineer (technician), and reception operator work on plural patients at a same time at separate places. Accordingly, for prevention of miscorrelation between patients and photographed images, and for collaboration between the tasks of there respective workers and collaboration between processings by the respective terminals (work stations), instruction information, which is called photographing order information, is generated in advance at the stage (1).
Photographing order information includes patient information on a patient, photographing information on photographing, such as the photographing date and time and photographing body part, and the like. Based on this photographing order information, a patient as a subject of photographing, photographing body part, and the like can be determined. Further, by storing photographed image data generated by photographing, linking it with the photographing order information, as described above, each photographed image can be identified, according to the photographing order information, and integrated administration cab be achieved.
However, in a small scale medical institution, such as a clinic, a workflow, as described above, is often carried out by a small number of people, such as a doctor and assistant, and there are many cases where a medical doctor alone does all the tasks. In such a case, the doctor does not work on other patients during the time between receiving a patient and completing diagnosis of the patient, and accordingly the doctor rarely miscorrelates patients and photographed images.
If a large-scale diagnosis aiding system, as described above, is applied as it is even in this situation, it is necessary to go through registration processing for issuing photographing order information at the time of reception, which requires a complicated procedure. Further, since the installation space for a system is limited, a functionally-distributed large-scale system, as described above, has not been an optimum one.
For example, in a case of working on patients one by one, photographed images are also generated serially one by one, and thus photographed images are obtained sequentially for patient by patient. Nevertheless, when patients and photographed images are to be linked by photographing order information, as carried out in a large-scale diagnosis aiding system, it is required to determine patients corresponding to respective images one by one, checking with the content of photographing order information, which is inefficient.
An object of the present invention is to provide a diagnosis aiding system that is suitable for a small-scale medical institution and is able to link patients and photographed images efficiently and simply.